April Kiss the Cooks event - Cheese, cheese, and more cheese!

It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since our last gathering. April’s KTC event was held at Shawn and Fernando’s house, and focused on making cheese. We met at the uncustomarily-early hour of 11am for mimosas and snacks, and after general pleasantries, settled in to discuss our game plan.

Shown here are baked kale chips, tangy Castelvetrano olives, Trader Joe’s delicious-and-surely-nutritious “Macadamias mix Gingerly with Cranberries & Almonds trek mix, beet hummus, and a fabulous shallot and caramelized onion jam (Original recipe here, but I'll post the recipe with my notes in a subsequent post).

Our project for the day? To create three cheeses: A soft goat cheese, a fresh ricotta, and a hand-stretched mozzarella made from fresh cheese curd.

Cheese’s main ingredient? Milk, of course – and boy, we had a lot of milk. We’d purchased 3 full gallons of goat’s milk from the St. John Creamery in Everett, WA (where Shawn and Fernando had the pleasure of meeting a stable-full of kids (the baby goat kind!), ranging in age from 2 days to 2 weeks!). We’d planned on purchasing the cow’s milk from Golden Glen Creamery, and ordered a week ahead at the U-District farmer’s market, but when we arrived, they had no milk for us, no suggestions about a back-up supply, and no apologies for not letting us know they wouldn’t be selling any whole milk. Fuming, we still bought 3 pounds of fresh curd from them (which we’d also pre-ordered and which they’d also forgotten, so we cleaned out their supply and they whined about us leaving them with no cheese curd), but be warned, Golden Glen Creamery – you are dead to us.

We ended up purchasing our cow’s milk from Vashon’s own Sea Breeze Farm, also in the U-District market. That guy didn’t even blink when I marched up and requested 3 gallons of milk, but the market ladies all began to gather around Fernando – he’d carried in a laundry basket to tote our milk, and found himself the focus of way more attention than he typically likes. However, we did glean some mean tips about where to find “the exact same milk” for “a whole dollar cheaper” (that tip from a lady who was flabbergasted at how we planned to drink all that milk before it went bad).

Here’s the cow milk, at the ready to be heated and curdled:


The task at hand seemed daunting, so we made sure to lighten things up before getting started on the hard work. Here’s jolly Joyce juggling:

And speaking of jug…gling…Nice jugs!

Joyce volunteered to be our in-house lemon-juicer, and didn’t flinch when we informed her we would need a minimum of 3 cups of juice.

Meanwhile, we got started heating the cow’s milk for the ricotta. We’d decided that we would make two different batches – one with an addition of heavy cream that used lemon juice as the acid, and another with no additional cream using white vinegar as the acid.

Slowly heating 3 gallons of milk (1.5 gallons in each stockpot!) is a task for the patient, and here you can see we had quite some time to go to reach 165 degrees.

Meanwhile, Joyce was giving that darned lemon press a whuppin,’ and her grand efforts paid off. If you ever wanted to know what two cups of lemon juice looks like, well, here it is!

When we first added the lemon juice to the cheese, it looked a bit like we’d added an egg, sort of stringy and generally yucky looking.

After a few moments, however, the actual curds began to appear—no less appetizing-looking, to be sure, but exciting proof of progress on our cheese-making journey nonetheless.

A few more minutes passed, and the curds continued to set up.

We poured the whey of this half-batch (lemon with added heavy cream) off to drain some of the curds:

Meg brought a cheese mold she had purchased in Greece some years before, and we decided to put it to the test. Essentially a large metal can with slits cut around the sides and bottom for drainage, we poured in the other half of the curds from this batch to drain just like somebody’s YaYa would have done.

Here you can really see how nicely the curds have formed and are draining:

The vinegar batch (made without any addition of cream) had only about half the yield of the other lemony-and-creamy batch, and with much smaller curds. I think you can tell in this photo:

No matter, we tied it up and left it to drain just the same.

Meanwhile, the goat milk was heating for our goat milk cheese recipe, and here, we are almost to 180 degrees.

Once the milk reached temperature, we added our 2 cups of lemon juice…

And immediately began to observe the results as the curd separated from the whey.

After a few minutes, we poured the curds into a giant cheesecloth-lined bowl to drain.

While that was going on, we checked the progress of our ricotta cheese, now a ball of pillowy goodness. If you stare at it long enough, you’ll think you see that caricature of the old lady with the big witchy chin who turns into a beautiful young maiden demurely averting her eyes if you look a different way. Other finds include a guy giving a thumbs-up, a nude back, and a duck.

Lastly, we worked on stretching the mozzarella cheese. We adapted two different recipes: Murray’s (which I found on Serious Eats) and the one I found on Kiss My Spatula. We slowly heated cheese curd by pouring ever-hotter water over it.

Once acclimated to the warmer temperatures, we stretched the curds in very hot water (between 160 and 170 degrees). Our friendly dentist Fernando had hooked us up with a box of nitrile gloves, which was a darn good thing since even with 3 layers of gloves on, that water was REALLY hot!

The idea was to stretch the cheese into twisty ropes, manipulating it enough just to improve elasticity, but not enough to make it tough. Here’s some shots of our first attempt:




Well, hi!

And, well, it actually resembles cheese! Pretty tasty, too!

Fernando and Rick tried (and burned!) their hands as well:


And Shawn finished up, impatiently forming what appears to be a small baby from the giant twisty mass of stretched curd:

In the background, some savory work was going on to create three flavors of goat cheese: garlic, truffle oil, and cumin. I expected the garlic to be my favorite, but loved the truffle variety.

Some of our Kissers ventured out to make ricotta ice cream. We learned two things: the Italian amaro digestive Strega is a “love it or hate it” kind of product, and Shawn’s food processor sounds like a garage-dwelling power tool when you turn it on. We ended up taking the food processor outside onto the balcony to try and mitigate the damage to everyone’s ears. Ice cream was made and put into the freezer.

Meanwhile, we set out to make a tomato sauce (loosely adapted from the Tomato Sauce recipe in the Moosewood Cookbook). Once the sauce had reduced nearly enough for us to stand a spoon up in it, we assembled a fabulous lasagna: our own fresh ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, our delicious homemade sauce, and fresh lasagna noodles from Pasta & Co. Lasagna in the oven, we assembled a simple watercress salad and vinaigrette, and pan-fried some panko-coated goat cheese fritters to serve on top.

Finally, after hours of work, dinner was ready. Look at those anticipatory faces!

The watercress and toasted walnut salad, with goat cheese fritter:

And, our magical lasagna, which made each and every one of us wonder aloud why we never, ever order or prepare lasagna:

Next up, Joyce and Jessica’s place this Saturday for a Cajun-cuisine extravaganza! Can’t wait to see you all!